Inviting contempt with this amnesty

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George W. is a Bush, first of all, and
he learned his manners. He's taking a
nice thank-you gift to the president of
Mexico, his host beginning Monday at
the Summit of the Americas in
Monterrey.

Just in time, too. Vicente Fox is
desperate for a place to dump several
million more of his countrymen, and
George W.'s amnesty looks cooked to
order.

Under George W.'s amnesty
scheme, 8 million (or maybe it's as
many as 14 million) illegal immigrants,
most of them from Mexico, will get to
jump ahead of everyone who was silly
enough to line up according to the law
to seek permanent residence in the
United States. "Legalizing" the illegals
will stabilize the supply of cheap labor
willing to work for subsistence wages,
and rich Republicans (and a lot of
wealthy Democrats) in their gated
communities won't have to learn how
to clean their swimming pools, mow
their lawns or diaper and burp their
babies.

Mr. Fox is impatient to get an open
border immediately, but the president
will no doubt explain, perhaps in the
border Spanish he learned in the days
when he was "young and foolish," that
the border can only be opened one
amnesty at a time. The 1986 amnesty
cracked it ajar, the Bush amnesty will
pry it open a little further and if all goes
as expected the full effects of the
deluge will be Jeb's to worry about.

Mr. Bush's suspicious critics say the
amnesty is the work of Karl Rove, the
dark genius of the White House, as the
ultimate pander to the Hispanic voter
that will lock up a half-dozen states
crucial to the president's re-election in
November.

The Hispanic vote, like the black
vote, the Jewish vote, the gay vote and
even the Muslim vote (if anyone has a
magnifying glass powerful enough to
find it), is a familiar chimera. The more
it eludes Republicans the more it
dazzles the president's men. They're
dazzled enough, in fact, to tell the
president's most reliable constituency,
the dumb whites, to get lost. George W.'s daddy took similar
advice in 1991. His campaign director boasted that offending
white conservatives wouldn't matter because the peasants
wouldn't have anywhere else to go, and nothing else to do,
on Election Day '92. Bill Clinton subsequently served two
terms, and had a high old time rubbing Republican noses in
Bubba dirt.

Pandering is the insult that everybody recognizes, and
Hispanics, like conservative gringos, are not as dumb as some
Republican political consultants think they are. Most Hispanics
were drawn across the border because they want to live in a
society that enables men and women who work hard and play
by rules to prosper. Most Hispanics, like most immigrants,
vote Democratic for a number of reasons, beginning with the
fact that Republicans often treat them like lab rats, figuring
they can alter their election-day behavior if they can figure out
just how to poke and tweak them.

Like everyone else, new immigrants, like the rest of us old
immigrants, want to live prosperous and secure lives. The
president's amnesty  "legalization" is the euphemism of the
day  will among other bad things make the nation's
southern border all but invisible, inviting terrorists from the
Middle East and elsewhere to import hell across that border.
Promises to enforce the law from now on ("this time we really
mean it"), like the notion that this is the final amnesty, invite
hoots of knowing laughter.

The president can't blame his critics for thinking that this is
an amnesty born of election-year expediency. His political
gurus are obsessed with trading his most reliable friends for
the prospect of winning minority voters. They want to clear
out the big tent to make it available to those who don't yet
want a place in it.

An analysis by United Press International of the 2002
congressional elections, one of George W. Bush's most
dramatic successes, showed that the Republican share of the
nonwhite vote dropped from 25 to 23 percent. The
Republicans did well nonetheless because their share of the
much larger white vote rose from 55 percent to 59 percent.
The Asians, whom some Republican strategists envision as
"the new Jews," continued to drift toward the Democrats, and
the "old Jews" continue, in Milton Himmelfarb's famous
formulation, "to earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto
Ricans."

The conservative agenda of low taxes, economic
opportunity, respect for faith, cultivation of family and a
respect for fair play will if properly presented appeal to
Hispanics in the way it appeals to others. Pandering will earn
only the contempt it deserves.